text-me-up! the book

Text-Me-Up! the book

Don't be mislead by Tracey's work being presented in the form of a book; this is someone's heart and soul wrapped up in paper, splashed with photographic ink with scatterings of text messages sprinkled throughout, Tracey calls them "sugar rushes of contact, postcards for the peoples' cyberspace", each telling a thousand different stories...- Sabotage Times

...an intriguing undertaking that has the feel of serious artefactual import.- Chimp magazine

Artist Tracey Moberly has saved every single text message she has ever received since 1999. Text Me Up! is an autobiographical work using the author's words and samples from all the texts she has received from people since the start of the SMS text messaging era. The book will be extensively illustrated featuring many of the artworks which Tracey has produced and exhibited over the last few years in relation to her work with texts.

The narrative is interspersed with past and current texts as she recalls a forgotten moment from a text prompting a question or an answer at the time of her current writing of the book. She has also invited several writers who have been part of her text process to write short pieces.

The story begins in Manchester, directly after Madchester, when she finds herself as a single parent following the breakdown of a long term tumultuous relationship. It follows accounts of her life and others through the tales of people's text messages she's received. At the same time Tracey weaves in another narrative of psychogeographical histories and places in Manchester, London, Moscow, New York and Haiti. Her journey moves between popular and unpopular culture, from underground to mainstream in the worlds of both music and art.

"Text messages are like little sugar rushes of contact, postcards for the people's cyberspace."